AHALife Acquires Bradford Shellhammer’s Design Marketplace Bezar

Bezar, the design ecommerce platform led by Fab cofounder Bradford Shellhammer, has today announced that it will be acquired by Australian ecommerce site AHALife.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

AHALife has been around since 2011, offering users hard-to-find, luxury design products. They ship to 200 countries and have more than 3,000 handpicked designers and artisans selling their wares on the platform.

Bezar launched back in March of 2015 with a simple premise: get right everything Fab.com got wrong.

Shellhammer curated the designers himself and sold design items under four umbrella categories — house, accessories, jewelry, and art.

But beyond simple curation, Bezar had an ever-changing home page, with new designers hosting a digital ‘pop-up shop’ every single day. Those designers then had the opportunity to set up a permanent storefront on Bezar, complete with their own pricing.

Most items tried to come under the $50 mark, save for a few ultra-special luxury products.

Bezar’s real money maker was the art business, as the company would license art from designers and do all the printing and shipping on their end, raking in a relatively higher margin than other design products.

In January, Re/Code’s Jason Del Rey reported that Bezar was close to shuttering after running out of cash. (Bezar raised $2.25 million from investors like Lerrer Hippeau, David Tisch, Charlie O’Donnell and others.)

“Someone only had half of the story,” said Shellhammer. “I’m not going to comment on the financials of the transaction, but anyone can see why this merger makes sense.”

Shellhammer explained that he and AHALife founder and CEO Shauna Mei share a very similar aesthetic taste, and that both of them believe in the consolidation of the design ecommerce industry.

That said, he did admit that “ecommerce is hard.”

All of Bezar’s 1,000 products will onboard to AHALife, expanding their reach from one country (the United States) to 200 countries overnight.

Shellhammer will join the AHALife team as an advisor, though it’s unclear how many of the seven members of the Bezar team will transition over as a part of the merger.

Mei confirmed that the Bezar brand will hang around for a while, but will eventually be folded fully into AHALife.